The Department of Global Ecology, founded in 2002 on the campus of Stanford University, conducts basic research on the interactions among the earth's ecosystems, land, atmosphere, and oceans. The goal of this research is understanding the ways these interactions shape the behavior of the earth system, including its responses to future changes.

The Department of Global Ecology includes faculty members, post-doctoral fellows, graduate students, and undergraduates, plus technical and administrative staff. There are opportunities for volunteers who wish to be involved in the research.

In Memoriam

Recent News

Tuesday, June 2, 2015 —The heat generated by burning a fossil fuel is surpassed within a few months by the warming caused by the release of its carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, according to new work from DGE's Xiaochun Zhang and Ken Caldeira published in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union. The release of CO2 into the atmosphere contributes to the trapping of heat that would otherwise be emitted into outer space. more »

Monday, May 25, 2015—You know the old saying: Location, location, location? It turns out that it applies to the Amazon rainforest, too. New work from DGE’s Greg Asner illustrates a hidden tapestry of chemical variation across the lowland Peruvian Amazon, with plants in different areas producing an array of chemicals that changes across the region’s topography. His team’s work is published by Nature Geoscience. more »

Tuesday, April 28, 2015—Joseph A. Berry, staff scientist at Carnegie’s Department of Global Ecology, has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences, one of 84 new members and 21 foreign associates. Election to the NAS is one of the highest honors given to scientists.
Berry has been a staff scientist at Carnegie since 1972. Over the years he has pioneered laboratory and field techniques for understanding the exchange of carbon dioxide and water between plants and the atmosphere. His models and methods are widely used for understanding local, regional, and global matter and energy fluxes, with important applications to crop yields, water resources, and climate change. more »

Tuesday, April 28, 2015— Some scientists have suggested that global warming could melt frozen ground in the Arctic, releasing vast amounts of the potent greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, greatly amplifying global warming. It has been proposed that such disastrous climate effects could be offset by technological approaches, broadly called geoengineering. One geoengineering proposal is to artificially whiten the surface of the Arctic Ocean in order to increase the reflection of the Sun’s energy into space and restore sea ice in the area.
New research from Carnegie’s Ivana Cvijanovic (now at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory) and Ken Caldeira, as well as Douglas MacMartin of Caltech, shows that while an incredibly large effort could, in principle, restore vast amounts of sea ice by this method, it would not result in substantial cooling. As a result, it would not be effective in keeping the ground frozen in the Arctic. Their findings are published by Environmental Research Letters. more »